In Translation: Modern Muslim Thinkers​

Series Editor: Abdou Filali-Ansary

This series aims to broaden current debate around Muslim civilisations. Although global in scope, academic and media conversations about Muslims often overlook works of new and original thinking produced in Muslim contexts.

This series aims to identify and translate some of these works, which have engendered important debates within their own indigenous settings, thereby introducing them to the wider discussions about Muslim civilisations taking place on the world stage.

The texts chosen for the series represent some of the most important, new, and cutting edge thinking from the Muslim world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.​

Explores the interaction between pre-Islamic tradition and modern supporters of continuity, reform and change in Muslim communities​

Published as Dalīl al-Muslim al-ḥazīn ilā muqtada-l-sulūk fī’l-qarn al-ʿishrīn in 1983, this book remains a timely and important read today. Both the resurgence of Islamist politics and the political, social and intellectual upheaval which accompanied the Arab Spring challenge us to re-examine the interaction between the pre-modern Islamic tradition and modern supporters of continuity, reform and change in the Muslim World. This book does exactly that, raising questions regarding issues about which other Muslim intellectuals and thinkers have been silent. These include – among others – current religious practice vs. the Islamic ideal; the many additions to the original revelation; the veracity of the Prophet’s biography and his sayings; the development of Sufism; and historical and ideological influences on Islamic thought.

Key Features

Makes available in English an important contribution to modern Muslim thought from a prominent Egyptian thinker

Looks at how current religious practice conforms (or not) to the Islamic ideal when Islam was first revealed

Engages critically with the sources by using historical, literal and logical criticism

'No history of modern Islamic thought, especially rationalist thought, can disregard this work----that has to do with its purely scholarly importance to the historian of ideas. But its charm, its gentle persuasiveness, its succinct description of what the author identifies as the shortcomings of modern Muslim thought makes this work of major importance to any reader, specialist or general, interested in modern Islam.'

- Shaikh Zayid Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies Emeritus, American University of Beirut, Tarif Khalidi

Hussein Ahmad Amin was born in Cairo in 1932 and died in 2014. While Deputy Director of the Diplomatic Institute in Cairo he produced several major works on Islam all of which were critical of Islamist movements.

The first English translation of this controversial essay that challenged fundamental ideas about political power

Egypt, 1925: the Muslim world is in turmoil over Mustapha Kamal Ataturk's proposal to abolish the caliphate in Turkey. The debate over Islam and politics re-ignites as traditional political systems dissolve under pressure from European powers and most Muslim countries lose their sovereignty.

Into this debate enters Ali Abdel Razek, a religious cleric trained at Al-Azhar University, arguing in favour of secularism in his essay 'Islam and the Foundations of Political Power', translated here for the first time.

Scholarly features include

A substantial introduction that places the essay in its context and explains its impact

An appendix of Razek’s sources with full publication details

Explanatory notes beside Razek’s original footnotes

Additional notes about particular people, events or vocabulary that may be unfamiliar to modern readers

‘It is somewhat astonishing that Ali Abdel Raziq’s Al-Islam Wa Usul Al-Hukm, one of the most discussed and most significant books of early twentieth-century Egyptian, Arab, and Islamic intellectual history, should have gone so long without a translation into English. Its appearance, in Edinburgh’s ‘In Translation: Modern Muslim Thinkers’ series, is therefore especially welcome…Filali-Ansari’s introduction situates the work in its own context, particularly stressing its importance in sparking what might be seen as the first major ‘public-opinion’ controversy of modern Middle Eastern history.’

This book could easily be called 'A Guide for the Modern Muslim', for someone to whom the sentiments of his or her ancestors resonate but who cannot accept the canonised formulas of a stultified education.

Charfi spells out what, for him, is the essential message of Islam, followed by a history of its unfolding through the person of the Prophet Muhammad, who was a visionary seeking to change the ideals, attitudes and behaviours of the society in which he lived.

The message and its history are delineated as two separate things, conflated by tradition. Charfi's reflections cross those horizons where few Muslim scholars have dared until now to tread. He confronts with great lucidity those difficult questions with which Muslims are struggling, attempting to reconsider them from a moral and political perspective that is independent of the frameworks produced by tradition.

Abdelmadjid Charfi was Professor of Arabic
Civilisation and Islamic Thought at the University of Manouba until his
retirement in 2002.